Silly Installation Question with Perl

I've loaded Foswiki onto my server LAMP with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. When I call up the initial /bin/view URL, however, I see Perl code. This happened to me years ago and I Googled for the answer. Today, however, Google throws up trash when I try to find out the reason the server presents Perl code instead of executing the code. If someone has a moment, I'd appreciate some direction as to how to configure the Apache server.

The files were uploaded in ASCII. I tried to rename the Perl files with .pl and .cgi which did not solve the problem. The files are permission 755. If I recall, this is a real bonehead problem, something incredibly simple to resolve. I just can't find anything online anymore that will help me.

Thanks.

You don't need to rename the files, that should be fine. Also your permissions should be fine.

Have you tried using the ApacheConfigGenerator to set Apache up? It will do all the work for you.

I imagine you are missing lines like this:

<Directory "/var/www/foswiki/bin">
...
    Options +ExecCGI  -FollowSymLinks
    SetHandler cgi-script
...

-- AndrewJones - 23 Dec 2009

Thanks, Andrew! The problem turned out to be a suexec error that, in turn caused premature headers to not be returned. And that was after adding the Directory code to the .conf file for my site (it's running under Virtualmin). The solution was to remove the suexec line, the first one, in the .conf file for my site then restart the Apache server; without removing the suexec line, the server had a problem executing within a virtual directory.

The specific errors I got were:

[Mon Jan 04 17:04:33 2010] [error] [client 96.224.211.214] suexec policy violation: see suexec log for more details
[Mon Jan 04 17:04:33 2010] [error] [client 96.224.211.214] Premature end of script headers: configure

And when I finally found the suexec log in /var/log/apache2 (in Ubuntu) I found these errors:

[2010-01-04 17:04:33]: uid: (1051/username) gid: (1022/1022) cmd: configure
[2010-01-04 17:04:33]: command not in docroot (/file/path/to/foswiki/bin/configure)

And, finally, this was the line removed from my site .conf in /etc/apache2/sites-available (in Ubuntu):

SuexecUserGroup "#1042" "#1018"

Hopefully that's enough detail to help the next person who might have an issue with their Foswiki install. Thank you again for your help!

-- TimSlavin - 04 Jan 2010